Announcement
Cyphr Selected to Present at MIT Sloan FinTech Conference
Feb 16, 2026
We're heading to MIT Sloan School of Management this week to present Cyphr at the MIT Sloan FinTech Conference.
The conference is one of the largest student-run fintech events in the country, bringing together industry leaders, VCs, and emerging companies working on the infrastructure that's reshaping financial services. This year's focus is on AI-driven innovation and post-product fintech solutions that are already in market.
We've been selected to present as part of the conference's showcase of financial technology companies solving coordination problems in capital markets.
What We're Presenting
Our presentation focuses on how Cyphr became readiness infrastructure for modern small business capital—not by building better software, but by building the missing primitive that the entire ecosystem depends on.
Here's the problem we're solving:
Every institution in the capital ecosystem—lenders, cities, ESOs, CDFIs, accelerators—is trying to interpret the same messy small business data. They all reach different conclusions. The result is that modern businesses (food trucks, barbers, gig workers, contractors) can't access capital not because they're unfundable, but because the system literally cannot see them.
Legacy underwriting was built for factories and franchises with clean financials and long credit histories. That's not the economy we have anymore.
Cyphr built the canonical readiness layer—a standardized, cross-institution understanding of what a business actually is and how ready it is for capital.
Why MIT Sloan
The MIT Sloan FinTech Conference isn't just another demo day. It's an academic and industry forum that examines how infrastructure actually gets built in fragmented markets.
The questions they're interested in exploring:
How do you become the canonical primitive for an entire industry when every institution has different incentives?
Why does upstream positioning create a defensible moat that direct-to-customer models can't replicate?
What happens when your data advantage compounds because the ecosystem routes through you by necessity?
What's valuable is the conversation with people who study infrastructure formation and can challenge whether we're solving the coordination problem in a structurally defensible way.
The Infrastructure Model
Most fintech companies build tools—better underwriting software, better application portals, better dashboards.
Cyphr built the layer those tools depend on.
The same way:
Plaid became the primitive for bank data
Stripe became the primitive for payments
Rippling became the primitive for employee records
Cyphr is becoming the primitive for small business capital readiness.
Our case study will walk through how we positioned differently from the beginning—going upstream into cities and economic mobility programs where businesses appear before they're ready, capturing pre-underwriting signals that train our Financial Language Model to interpret modern small businesses.
What This Means Going Forward
Infrastructure doesn't get built by accident. It gets built when someone realizes the system is missing a layer, figures out how to provide it, and then proves why that layer should be canonical.
That's the story we're presenting at MIT Sloan.
After the conference, we'll share insights from the case study discussion—what questions the academic and investment community raised, what we learned from presenting to people whose job is to think critically about how systems work, and what it reinforced about the path forward.
For now, we're grateful for the opportunity to present Cyphr's infrastructure model to one of the leading business schools in the country—and to contribute to the broader conversation about how fintech infrastructure gets built.
Event Details: MIT Sloan FinTech Conference
February 2026
MIT Sloan School of Management
Cambridge, MA
Follow along for updates from the conference on LinkedIn
About Cyphr
Cyphr is capital readiness infrastructure for modern small businesses. We built the canonical readiness primitive that cities, lenders, ESOs, and the capital ecosystem depend on to understand and fund businesses that don't fit traditional underwriting models.
